The Constant Gardener (33 page)

On the train journey he had slept little, and last night in the hotel not at all. He traveled with no bulky papers anymore, no canvas suitcases, laptops or attachments. Whatever needed to be preserved had gone to Ham's draconian aunt in Milan. What didn't, lay two fathoms deep on a Mediterranean seabed. Freed of his burden, he moved with a symbolic lightness. Sharper lines defined his features. A stronger light burned behind his eyes. And Justin felt this of himself. He was gratified that Tessa's mission was henceforth his own.

The corner house was a turreted German castle on five floors. The ground floor was daubed in jungle stripes which by daylight revealed themselves as parrot green and orange. Last night under the sodium lighting they had resembled flames of sickly black and white. From an upper floor a mural of brave children of all races grinned at him, recalling the waving children of Tessa's laptop. They were replicated live in a window on the ground floor, seated in a ring round a harassed woman teacher. A handmade display in the window next to them asked how chocolate grew, and offered curling photographs of cocoa beans.

Feigning disinterest, Justin first walked past the building, then turned abruptly left and sauntered up the pavement, pausing to study the nameplates of fringe medics and psychologists. In a civilized country you can never tell. A police car rolled by, tires crackling in the rain. Its occupants, one a woman, eyed him without expression. Across the street two old men in black raincoats and black homburg hats seemed to be waiting for a funeral. The window behind them was curtained. Three women on push-bikes glided toward him down the hill. Graffiti on the walls proclaimed the Palestinian cause. He returned to the painted castle and stood before the front door. A green hippo was painted on it. A smaller green hippo marked the doorbell. An ornate bay window like a ship's prow peered down on him. He had stood here last night to post his letter. Who peered down on me then? The harassed teacher in the window gestured to him to use the other door but it was closed and barred. He gestured his contrition in return.

“They should have left it open,” she hissed at him, unappeased, when she had slid the bolts and hauled back the door.

Justin again apologized and trod delicately between the children, wishing them “gruss Dich” and “guten Tag,” but his alertness put limits on his once-infinite courtesy. He climbed a staircase past bicycles and a perambulator, and entered a hall that to his wary eye seemed to have been reduced to life's necessities: a water fountain, a photocopier, bare shelves, piles of reference books and cardboard boxes stacked in piles on the floor. Through an open doorway he saw a young woman in horn-rimmed spectacles and a rollneck sitting before a screen.

“I'm Atkinson,” he told her in English. “Peter Atkinson. I have an appointment with Birgit from Hippo.”

“Why didn't you telephone?”

“I got into town late last night. I thought a note was best. Can she see me?”

“I don't know. Ask her.”

He followed her down a short corridor to a pair of double doors. She pushed one open.

“Your journalist's here,” she announced in German, as if “journalist” were synonymous with illicit lover, and strode back to her quarters.

Birgit was small and springy with pink cheeks and blonde hair and the stance of a cheerful pugilist. Her smile was quick and compelling. Her room was as sparse as the hall, with the same vague air of self-deprival.

“We have our conference at ten,” she explained a little breathlessly as she grasped his hand. She was speaking the English of her e-mails. He let her. Mr. Atkinson did not need to make himself conspicuous by speaking German.

“You like tea?”

“Thanks. I'm fine.”

She pulled two chairs to a low table and sat in one. “If it's about the burglary, we have really nothing to say,” she warned him.

“What burglary?”

“It is not important. A few things were taken. Maybe we had too many possessions. Now we don't.”

“When was this?”

She shrugged. “Long ago. Last week.”

Justin pulled a notebook from his pocket and, Lesley-style, opened it on his knee. “It's about the work you do here,” he said. “My paper is planning a series of articles on drug companies and the Third World. We're calling it ”Merchants of Medicine.“ How the Third World countries have no consumer power. How big diseases are in one place, big profits in another.” He had prepared himself to sound like a journalist but wasn't sure he was succeeding. “”The poor can't pay, so they die. How much longer can this go on? We seem to have the means, but not the will.“ That kind of thing.”

To his surprise she was smiling broadly. “You want me to give you the answer to these simple questions before ten o'clock?”

“If you could just tell me what Hippo does, exactly—who finances you—what your remit is, as it were,” he said severely.

She was talking, and he was writing in the notebook on his knee. She was giving him what he supposed was her party piece and he was pretending his hardest to listen while he wrote. He was thinking that this woman had been Tessa's friend and ally without meeting her, and that if they had met, both would have congratulated themselves on their choice. He was thinking that there can be a lot of reasons for a burglary and one of them is to provide cover to anyone installing the devices that produce what the Foreign Office is pleased to call Special Product, for mature eyes only. He was remembering his security training again, and the group visit to a macabre laboratory in a basement behind Carlton Gardens where students could admire for themselves the newest cute places for planting subminiature listening devices. Gone the flowerpots, lamp stands, ceiling roses, moldings and picture frames, enter pretty well anything you could think of from the stapler on Birgit's desk to her Sherpa jacket hanging from the door.

He had written what he wanted to write and she had apparently said what she wanted to say, because she was standing up and peering into a stack of pamphlets on a bookshelf, looking for some background reading she could give him as a prelude to getting him out of her office in time for her ten o'clock conference. While she hunted she talked distractedly about the German Federal Drug Agency and declared it to be a paper tiger. And the World Health Organization gets its money from America, she added with disdain—which means it favors big corporations, reveres profit and doesn't like radical decisions.

“Go to any WHO assembly—what do you see?” she asked rhetorically, handing him a bunch of pamphlets. “Lobbyists. PR people from the big pharmas. Dozens of them. From one big pharma, maybe three or four. ”Come to lunch. Come to our weekend get-together. Have you read this wonderful paper by Professor So-andSo?“' And the Third World is not sophisticated. They have no money, they are not experienced. With diplomatic language and maneuvering, the lobbyists can get behind them easy.”

She had stopped speaking and was frowning at him. Justin was holding up his open notebook for her to read. He was holding it close to his face so that she could see his expression while she read his message; and his expression, he hoped, was quelling and reassuring at the same time. In support of it he had extended the forefinger of his free left hand by way of warning.

I AM TESSA QUAYLE'S HUSBAND AND I DO NOT TRUST THESE WALLS. CAN YOU MEET ME THIS EVENING AT FIVE-THIRTY IN FRONT OF THE OLD FORT?

She read the message, she looked past his raised finger at his eyes and kept looking at them while he filled the silence with the first thing that came into his head.

“So are you saying that what we need is some kind of independent world body that has the power to override these companies?” he demanded, with unintentional aggression. “Cut down their influence?”

“Yes,” she replied, perfectly calmly. “I think that would be an excellent idea.”

He walked past the woman in the rollneck and gave her the kind of cheery wave he thought appropriate to a journalist. “All done,” he assured her. “Just off. Thank you for your cooperation”—so there's no need to telephone the police and tell them you have an impostor on the premises.

He tiptoed through the classroom and tried once more to woo a smile from the harassed teacher. “For the last time,” he promised her. But the only people who smiled were the kids.

In the street the two old men in raincoats and black hats were still waiting for the funeral. At the curbside two stern young women sat in an Audi saloon, studying a map. He returned to his hotel and on a whim inquired at the desk whether he had mail. No mail. Reaching his room, he tore the offending page from his notebook, then the page beneath it because the imprint had come through. He burned them in the hand basin and put on the extractor to get rid of the smoke. He lay on his bed wondering what spies did to kill time. He dozed and was woken by his phone. He lifted the receiver and remembered to say, “Atkinson.” It was the housekeeper, “checking,” she said. Excuse her, please. Checking what, for God's sake? But spies don't ask those questions aloud. They don't make themselves conspicuous. Spies lie on white beds in gray towns and wait.

•      •      •

Bielefeld's old fort stood on a high green mound overlooking cloud-laden hills. Car parks, picnic benches and municipal gardens were laid out among the ivy-covered ramparts. In warmer months it was a favored spot for the townspeople to perambulate down tree-lined avenues, admire the regiments of flowers and eat beery lunches in the Huntsman's Restaurant. But in the gray months the place had the air of a deserted playground in the clouds, which was how it looked to Justin this evening as he paid off his taxi and, early by twenty minutes, made what he hoped was a casual reconnaissance of his chosen rendezvous. The empty car parks, sculpted into the battlements, were pitted with rainwater. From sodden lawns, rusted signs warned him to control his dog. On a bench beneath the battlements, two veterans in scarves and overcoats sat bolt upright, observing him. were they the same two old men who had worn black homburg hats this morning while they waited for the funeral? Why do they stare at me like this? Am I Jewish? Am I a Pole? How long before your Germany becomes just another boring European country?

One road only led to the fort and he strolled along it, keeping at the crown in order to avoid the trenches of fallen leaves. When she arrives I'll wait till she parks before I speak to her, he decided. Cars too have ears. But Birgit's car had no ears because it was a bicycle. At first sight she resembled some kind of ghostly horsewoman, urging her reluctant steed over the brow of the hill while her plastic cape filled behind her. Her fluorescent harness resembled a Crusader's cross. Slowly the apparition became flesh, and she was neither a winged seraph nor a breathless messenger from the battle, but a young mother in a cape riding a bicycle. And from the cape protruded not one head but two, the second belonging to her jolly blond son, strapped into a child's pillion seat behind her —and measuring, to Justin's inexpert eye, about eighteen months on the Richter scale.

And the sight of them both was so entirely pleasant to him, and so incongruous, and appealing, that for the first time since Tessa's death he broke out in real, rich, unrestrained laughter.

“But at such short notice, how should I get a baby-sitter?” Birgit demanded, offended by his mirth.

“You shouldn't, you shouldn't! It doesn't matter, it's wonderful. What's his name?”

“Carl. What's yours?”

Carl sends his love … The elephant mobile you sent Carl drives him completely crazy … I hope very much your baby will be as beautiful as Carl.

He showed her his Quayle passport. She examined it, name, age, photograph, shooting frank looks at him between.

“You told her she was waghalsig,” he said, and watched her frown become a smile as she hauled off her cape and wound it up and gave him the bike to hold so that she could unbuckle Carl from his seat. And having released Carl and set him on the road, she unstrapped a saddlebag and turned her back to Justin so that he could load up the backpack she was wearing: Carl's bottle, a packet of Knackebrot, spare nappies and two ham and cheese baguettes wrapped in greaseproof paper.

“You have eaten today, Justin?”

“Not much.”

“S. We can eat. Then we shall not be so nervous. Carlchen, du machst das bitte nicht. We can walk. Carl will walk forever.”

Nervous? Who's nervous? Affecting to undertake a study of the menacing rain clouds, Justin swung himself slowly round on his heel, head in air. They were still there, two old sentries sitting to attention.

•      •      •

“I don't know how much stuff actually went missing,” Justin complained, when he had told her the story of Tessa's laptop. “I had the impression there was a lot more correspondence between the two of you that she hadn't printed out.”

“You did not read about Emrich?”

“That she had emigrated to Canada. But she was still working for KVH.”

“You do not know what her position is now—her problem?”

“She quarreled with Kovacs.”

“Kovacs is nothing. Emrich has quarreled with KVH.”

“What on earth about?”

“Dypraxa. She believes she has identified certain very negative side effects. KVH believes she has not.”

“What have they done about it?” asked Justin.

“So far they have only destroyed her reputation and her career.”

“That's all.”

“That's all.”

They walked without speaking for a while, with Carl stalking out ahead of them, diving for decaying horse chestnuts and having to be restrained before he put them in his mouth. Evening fog had formed a sea across the rolling hills, making islands of their rounded tops.

“When did this happen?”

“It is happening still. She has been dismissed by KVH and dismissed again by the Regents of Dawes University in Saskatchewan and the governing body of the Dawes University Hospital. She tried to publish an article in a medical journal concerning her conclusions regarding Dypraxa but her contract with KVH had a confidentiality clause, therefore they suited her and suited the magazine and no copies were allowed.”

“Sued. Not suited. Sued.”

“It's the same.”